Monday, March 13, 2006

Because, honestly, Firefox is missing some fairly major CSS features. Notably, it's missing support for "inline-block." This problem has been known since 1999 (7 years ago!) and is listed as bug 9458, but the Mozilla people haven't been particularly inclined to fix it.

I think the problem is fairly important because it's the one CSS feature that allows for arbitrary nesting of inlines and blocks. Usually, you can put inlines in blocks and blocks in other blocks. Inline-block is the feature that lets you put blocks in inlines. This opens up a certain class of layouts that aren't otherwise possible.

Reading the bug description in bugzilla, it seems like Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine is fundamentally flawed and can't really handle this feature without a major rewrite. Internet Explorer handles inline-block well, so, in my opinion, IE has superior CSS compliance than Firefox.